The Coffee Warehouse

You can not efficiently demarcate workloads in a coffee shop the same way you do in a warehouse due many factors including: the lack of transparency in the work done by the work units and the unpredictability of how a single work-unit can impact the entire plant.

The queue management models that work for banks, grocery stores, and warehouses do not fit the highly interdependent plant operations of a coffee shop--Poisson doesn't cut it.

At any given time, there's a good deal of work contained in the "head cache" of the workers (lack of transparency) and orders are (largely) interdependent due to the limited throughput and cornucopia of wait-states of the components that process them.

For a better analog, look at the classic French "brigade de cuisine" system developed by Escoffier and watch videos of high-end restaurants during service.

Pay particular attention to the expediter and notice how there's specialization, redundancy in labor, and semaphoring to manage exceptions, wait-states, and accommodate the entirety of the workload.

None of those strategies can be utilized (at-scale) in a coffee-shop due to vastly different expectations of workload processing timeline, quality, variance, available labor, expected margin, and physical plant size.

A large fast-food restaurant is middle-ground between these extremes.

Mobile customers are a kind of second-class citizen for McDonalds, though they have instructed the drive-through salespeople to always lead with "Will you be using the mobile app today?". MCD uses location tracking to only submit the mobile order once you are in range of the store.

Should probably add that in-store customers are third-class citizens; drive-through orders without customization get priority.

At Starbucks, I usually just get a cup of black coffee. Often the barista dispenses it as I'm paying, skipping the queue of orders to be made. However, sometimes I get my coffee cup put into the queue. When this happens, starting this year, it seems they'll carry it out to my table. Before that, they'd put it into the queue of orders which could take awhile. It seems partially barista dependent and partially whether they need to rebrew. I've found that asking for "whatever's brewed" doesn't help; they don't want to pick a blend.

Interesting to think about. Local coffee shop baristas are more transparent about what's brewed and enjoy taking the opportunity to recommend a certain roast or origin if I'm not picky. However, their systems fall down when they're unexpectedly busy.

My local cafe that does both coffee and sandwiches (dine-in, to go and catering) is possibly the worst, not taking orders until they feel caught up on the sandwiches. You can end up waiting 10+ minutes just to get a cup of coffee. From a queueing/distribution perspective, they should be taking those orders constantly and letting them pile up so they have more information about what they need to make and they can reduce the mean wait time. On the other hand, their baffling system is charming and the people placing large orders love the attention and spend way more money than I do. :)

The sandwich shop on campus years ago always had a long (20+ people) line, for almost the entire time they were open. There would be a few lulls each day, where you could be one of two or three people waiting, especially during afternoon classes. To reduce line sizes, the sandwich vendors created an app and call-in number for mobile orders, which were prioritized over the counter service. The result was you would be one of two people waiting at the counter during the afternoon lull, while fifty tickets printed and the 2-3 employees solely did online orders. How you prioritize mobile orders might be the biggest factor in keeping/eliminating counter service.

Interesting analysis. If you’re into efficient operations, consider making coffee at home/office and either make your own banana bread (easy and far tastier!) or skip it!

Starbucks might have to worry less about their revenue if they brought customers like me back into the fold by not firing labour organisers, and engaging in meaningful discussions about what being a “partner” in a business means.

I've got to say, there's nothing more infuriating than standing in front of a register while everyone behind the counter is busy working on online orders that won't get picked up for quite a while, as evidenced by their repeatedly calling out names for the online orders waiting forlornly at the end of the counter.

(this is at a campus Dunkies where there's no drive-through, and I have a hard deadline to start my lecture. If there's no line at the register, and I've got five minutes before class starts in a room down the hall, it shouldn't take a logistical genius to get me a regular coffee in time for class)

When they removed most of the seating and rearranged things in a way that made people understand that sitting there for prolong periods was no longer welcome, and at the same time made their coffee available as nespresso capsules, what was the point of going there anymore? To eat shitty sugar-laden, calorie-heavy desserts? On GLP-1 i can't get a bit of those anymore.